In the Tech World, the Graybeard is the older engineer who tutors all the young 'uns. A Silicon Graybeard is my name for an old electronics engineer. Here are mental droppings on liberty, firearms, radio, home machine shops and making all kinds of stuff - electronic and more. Someone needs to know how to do just about anything after the collapse, and that someone is us.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Leave it to the Times

The New York Times lost all credibility with me ages ago. Every so often I'll see a conservative commentator say that something published in the Times justifies their view, and I want to agree - but then that's sloppy thinking, and I hate sloppy thinking. Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize winning physicist, coined a term about temporary amnesia while reading papers, which is now called Gell-Mann amnesia. The idea is that you read an article in the paper about something you know a lot about and you say to yourself, "What a piece of crap! This paper isn't good enough for wrapping dead fish!", then you turn the page and read an article on something you don't know about and just accept what they said, as if they're always credible. In fact, they're probably just as wrong on this as they were on the thing you know about.

My son emailed me this link to an article in the NYT in answer to the "more guns, less crime" view I express all the time. The article is called "More Guns = More Killing" and I don't recommend you read it, unless you want to find the holes in it. In true NYT fashion, they assert a lot of things as true just because they say so, or under appeal to authority. For example,

After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia
enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before
purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Before then, Australia had
averaged one mass shooting a year. Since, rates of both homicide and
suicide have dropped 50 percent, and there have been no mass killings,
said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.(emphasis added by me)

...homicides “continued a modest decline” since 1997. They concluded that
the impact of the National Firearms Agreement was “relatively small,”
with the daily rate of firearms homicides declining 3.2%.”

Scientific studies have consistently found that places with more guns
have more violent deaths, both homicides and suicides. Women and
children are more likely to die if there’s a gun in the house. The more
guns in an area, the higher the local suicide rates. “Generally, if you
live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death,” said David
Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “There
is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.”
(emphasis added by me)

which pretty much conflicts with what we know about Switzerland, not to mention all of the excellent work done by John Lott and others here in the states.

I don't know how valuable this sort of comparison would be under any circumstances, even without the logical and argumentative flaws in this piece. Once you get out of the tourist zones, much of Latin America is not a nice place, and the culture there is very different from the US culture. I'm especially inclined to dismiss cross-cultural studies just because there are so many confounding variables. It would be like saying Fallujah is more dangerous than the US, and it's because of the guns, while ignoring the influence of Al Qaeda, the war going on there, the differences between a Muslim country and the US and about a hundred other things. Although I'm not sure how much more dangerous Fallujah is than Chicago.

Statistics, Facts and the Truth do not matter to the gun grabbing would-be Tyrants and Hoplophobes. Socialism is their religion and government is their god. Socialists cannot abide armed serfs. That is because Socialism is not a dysfunctional economic system. It is a mechanism of Control and it works exactly as intended.

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Long time radio engineer, follower of Christ, RF designer, mentor. Radio ham, home shop machinist, lapidary, silversmith, roadie cyclist, learning to be a rifleman, and home defender, - a guy with too many interests to keep track of.

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